Atlantis book – Atlantis book. What a fascinating idea! It always reminds me of the old Aelita by Alexei Tolstoy, a book which (in the Moscow Foreign Languages Publishing House version) always had an incredibly magical feeling for me. In fact, recently I’ve been toying with the idea of trying to get it sent to me, as the chances of finding it here again are nil. Atlantis is great.

Did you think of using this new ‘research’ that traces Atlantis to this amazing Greek settlement on a volcanic island ringed by an outer ridge (annoyingly I can’t remember the name), which was subsequently blown up by a huge eruption? I think it’s on Crete that they discovered wall paintings under a layer of ash that had an almost map-like depiction of Atlantis, and the picture seemed to be of this ringed-island place, answering to the first major reference to Atlantis by whatever ancient writer wrote about it.

In fact, if memory serves me correctly, they reckoned that it had been the same eruption that did for the Minoan civilisation on Crete as well. They dated it by pottery-styles and stuff.

A diver went down to check the walls of the remaining hard ring (because the outer ring or another ring built up by the eruption still survives, though the island was completely destroyed), and reckoned that it was dangerously cracked and that another similarly-dangerous eruption might happen any day.

(All very inconvenient, of course, if you want to do a sort of Carl Barks lost-city-under-the-sea version of Atlantis instead, or Tolkien’s ‘Atalante’, Numinor sunk under the waves, or something).

Tuesday

The popular notion of amnesia comes from media reports or soap operas. People are found wandering about, with no idea what their names are, where they come from, or about any other details of their past. This does indeed happen – generally as a reaction to stressful conflicts in everyday life. The memory is usually restored to normal within a couple of days. Exactly what has happened to impair their sense of recall is debatable, and seems to differ from case to case. What is most intriguing is that the precise form the memory defect takes seems to depend on their own preconceived views[*] on how memory itself functions.

Perhaps the closest analogy is with “glove anaesthesia,” a phenomenon often observable in sufferers from hysteria. This is a form of numbness which extends up to the wrist, incapacitating the subject’s hand, but not corresponding with the actual nerve patterns which dictate feeling in this part of the human anatomy. In other words, it is the mind which has decided that the hand is paralysed, rather than any impairment in the actual somatic structure of the body. It is because we think of the hand as a hand (the foot as a foot, the arm as an arm, and so on), rather than seeing it – correctly – as part of a complex gestalt of somatic processes, that it is possible to conceptualise such paralysis. In the case of amnesiacs, how much is genuine failure of the memory system itself, as opposed to a simple refusal to remember,[+] is extremely hard to tell.